Nèlson
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Nèlson is a male given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Cape Verde it is the 22nd most common surname. Recorded meaning: From English Nelson, from Middle English.
- GDGrenada1 in 408(measured from records)
- GYGuyana1 in 775
- USUnited States1 in 783
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 449 (measured from records)
- 1 in 408 (inferred from the name graph)
424,958 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Grenada
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Nelson in US United States, ES Spain, IN India and 1 more.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)- EnglishNelson(measured from records)
- MiddleEnglish(measured from records)
From English Nelson, from Middle English.
Cited for this meaning 14
- A concise dictionary of first names
- A dictionary of surnames
- DUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Il grande libro dei nomi per bebè. Significato, origini, curiosità. Oltre 7000 nomi per bambine e bambini Significato,…
Attested across 27 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Nèlson is found
(measured from records)Nèlson counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 424,958 | 1 in 783 | 425K | Nelson | 449 |
| SE Sweden | — | 1,575 | 1 in 6.5K | 1.6K | — | 36 |
| GY Guyana | — | 968 | 1 in 775 | 968 | — | — |
| IN India | — | 820 | 1 in 1.6M | 820 | Nelson | 85 |
| ES Spain | — | 489 | 1 in 102K | 2.7K | Nelson | 150 |
| NO Norway | — | 470 | 1 in 12K | 470 | — | 17 |
| GD Grenada | — | 277 | 1 in 408 | 277 | — | — |
| CV Cape Verde | #22 | — | — | — | Nelson | 26 |
424,958 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Nèlson mean, and where does it come from?
- From English Nelson, from Middle English. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names and A dictionary of surnames and 12 other sources.
- Is Nèlson a male or female name?
- Nèlson is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Nèlson?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 425 thousand people named Nèlson, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nelson. After it come Sweden, Guyana, India and Spain; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Nèlson most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Nèlson is densest in Grenada — about 1 in 408 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Nèlson?
- In the United States, the national register counted 424,958 people named Nèlson in 2010, about 1 in 783 residents.
- How common is Nèlson compared with other names?
- In Cape Verde, Nèlson is the 22nd most common surname of 2,258 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Nèlson?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/n%C3%A8lsonThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Nèlson” — the 22nd most common surname in Cape Verde. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.